Climate Change and Individual Responsibility

In this paper, the author argues that individual causal inefficacy is false not just for its claim about whole human lives but even for its far weaker claim of the inefficacy of single individual actions, such as a Sunday drive. He claims that it fails for two main reasons. First, if individual actions such as Sunday drives arc not causes of climate change, then what does cause climate change? The cause would have to be some metaphysically odd emergent entity. Second, an expected (dis-)utility calculation shows that individual acts do make an expected difference, and one that is not insignificant. His argument becomes quite general about the many ways in which people fail to account properly for potential harms of actions where the causes are many and the effects are indirect. Since this is a common phenomenon, he discusses discuss several possible explanations of why it is difficult for people to grasp individual moral responsibility with regard to global phenomena.